The past few decades have seen incredible development of technology and systems for computer assisted, image based, or image-guided surgery. The advances in image-guided surgery are tied in part to technological and scientific improvements in imaging and 3D computer graphics. For example, the early work of Mark Levoy, Turner Whitted, Richard Holloway, and Stephen Pizer in the late 1980s provided new 3D computer graphics rendering techniques, medical image shape detection, and head-mounted displays. These are some of the building blocks of later image-guided surgery systems built at the University of North Carolina in the mid 1990s and after.
Image-guided surgery makes use of imaging to aid the surgeon to perform more effective or more accurate surgery. As merely one example of such image-guided surgery, the use of ultrasound to guide needles being inserted into the liver for ablation are used by the surgeon to help guide the needle.
Current image-guided surgery systems, however, have inadequate image management. For example, many systems require a surgeon or other practitioner to forego performing other activities during a procedure in order to manipulate, using a mouse-and-monitor interface, the view of CT scans, MRI images, and other visualizable data. This suspension or disruption of the procedure can take time and reduce fluidity. Another issue with some systems is that they do not provide sufficient control and flexibility in viewing CT scans and other visualizable medical data due to unintuitive and difficult interfaces. Yet another problem with current 3D viewing systems is that they display visualizable medical data in a way that obscures those areas in which the operator is interested.
One or more of these problems and others are addressed by the systems, methods, devices computer-readable media, and other embodiments described herein. That is, some of the embodiments may address one or more issue, while other embodiments may address different issues.